Internet Learning Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2012 | Page 6

The Professor as Craftsman in the Digital Age

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System uses national benchmarked tests by Princeton’s Educational Testing Service (ETS) such
as the Proficiency Profile and Major Field Tests in various majors. This shows them where they
stack up against other colleges and other programs.
At the end of each class the University uses the Community of Inquiry (COI) end of
class survey to measure the indirect experience of the student. The COI is a scientifically
validated instrument that has been taken by more than 500,000 online students and was designed
to measure the efficacy of the online classroom (Boston and Boston 2010). This instrument looks
at three kinds of presences. Social presence measures how much social engagement there is in
the classroom as a learning environment. Teaching presence measures the student’s perception of
the effectiveness of the teacher as leader of the class. Cognitive presence measures the student’s
opinion of how successful the class has been designed and set up as a learning environment. By
combining drops, withdrawals and failing grades with the ETS data and the COI data we are
beginning to get a more complete picture of the online classroom. This combination of direct and
indirect measures helps us understand what is going on in the classroom.
But this university is not done yet. Using IBM’s SPSS Modeler and predictive analytics
they have analyzed more than 80 variables of student data such as gender, age, GPA, number of
credits transferred in and so on. They can use this data to predict which students are likely to
succeed and which need interventions. Other universities have used similar measures to manage
student success with varying degrees of accuracy
One of the hallmarks of the university has been the role of the faculty in governance.
Faculty has the responsibility of governance because of their expertise as scholars (Birnbaum
1988). With the introduction of online learning to the university this can be seen to challenge the
professor’s role as expert. While professors are experts in their subject matter, many are not
experts in pedagogy and learning theory. There are now instructional designers, faculty
development specialists, and learning theorists who can contribute to the student success in new
ways.
For example, I took my Ph.D. in philosophy and never took a single class in teaching,
pedagogy, classroom management, or student management. I knew nothing about learning
theory. I started my first job teaching Introduction to Philosophy in a local college. I walked into
the first class and began to teach much like “Athena was born full grown sprung from the head of
Zeus.” Athena was not a baby—she was born full grown. The idea of the professor is also that
there is no gestation period. They come to their profession full grown and mature in their craft.
If we challenge the idea that experts in biology and psychology and philosophy may not
be experts in teaching we challenge the fundamental idea of the University.
With the digital classroom there are new tools and new roles for the professor
(Christensen and Eyring 2011). The classroom as communal means the professor is being
decentralized. As this happens the very concept of the power of faculty is challenged. Since the
birth of online learning there has been a significant hostility to digital classrooms by members
the professorship. Suddenly cheating online became an issue of focus in online courses when in
fact it has been an issue for the whole history of the university. Suddenly there were questions
about the quality of online learning when in fact these questions apply just as well to the
traditional classroom. We will argue that there is a good reason for this. For the first time in the
history of the university, there is public record of the class that can be accessed by those who are
not experts in the field. This changes the balance of power and the structure of teaching. It
changes how we think about grading. It challenges some long held beliefs about academic
freedom.